The Currey cycle of Great Salt Lake: an early Younger Dryas lake in the Bonneville basin, Utah, USA

Abstract

The highest cycle of post-Lake Bonneville Great Salt Lake in the Bonneville basin, Utah, USA, was thought for many years to have formed the ‘Gilbert shoreline’ (quotation marks indicate lack of scientific support). Mapping of the ‘shoreline’ is not reproducible and the concept has multiple problems, including that the ‘shoreline’ cannot be correlated with the well-documented major rise of Great Salt Lake during the terminal Pleistocene. To avoid confusion, we propose abandoning the name Gilbert, which previously had been applied informally to both the hypothetical shoreline and lake cycle, and instead we use the name Currey cycle for the lake rise. During the Younger Dryas Currey cycle, Great Salt Lake became fresh to brackish about 12 700 cal a bp, and rose roughly 15 m higher than the modern lake. The end of the Currey cycle marked the beginning of extensive human occupation of the Old River Bed inland delta.